With the recent addition of the GitSync and Add Page by Form plugins along with the arrival of the Gantry 5 Framework to the Grav universe, 2017 holds even greater promise for (open) educators to benefit from Grav. With these new elements, not only will the setup of the multi-device friendly and collaborative Grav Course Hub be easier and quicker, but a whole new range of applications with Grav opens up in relation to open blogging and online OER authoring/sharing. Let’s start with the Grav Course Hub!

Since I first started exploring using Grav almost two years ago as an open and collaborative platform for the field of education, I have dreamed of a seamless 2-way sync of Grav site content to such services as GitHub or GitLab. Now, with the great work of the Trilby Media team (the people who created Grav) not only will this possible for myself but also the entire Grav community. By sponsoring the development of the open source Git Sync Plugin I was able to not only support the team behind Grav but also increase the audience for my own Course Hub skeleton package and consultation services about the use of Grav in the education space.

If my reading of the tea leaves is correct, there could be a big uptake of the use of the Canvas LMS in Canada with news of a possible hosted in Canada cloud offering. As a sessional faculty member of the Computing Science Department at Simon Fraser University I’ve been using Canvas for the past several years and I thought it might be helpful for other potential users of Canvas to share my experiences so far.

In this article, we will look at how to use Grav with GitHub Desktop and GitLab. Unlike GitHub, you can install GitLab onto your own server, which is an attractive option for many higher education institutions. A locally hosted version of GitLab is used in this walkthrough.